The AEO checklist: how to get cited by ChatGPT

Nine fixes that make a page quotable to ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Six you can do this afternoon. Three take months and other people.

You get cited by ChatGPT the same way you get cited by a person: by being the clearest, most specific answer to the question, somewhere a machine can read it without guessing. The nine fixes below are in the order we would do them, and they start with the one that decides whether the other eight are worth the afternoon.

The other post, What is AEO, covers what answer engines are and why they matter more than your ranking. This one assumes you are already convinced and gets to the list.

Does your homepage say what you do, and who for, in one sentence?

Read the first screen out loud. If a stranger can finish "they do ___ for ___, in ___" without scrolling, you pass; if they would have to guess, so does the engine.

If it does not pass, stop here. Every fix below makes an answer easier to find and easier to quote, and if the page carries no answer, structure and schema only make the absence tidier. An engine that has to guess picks the competitor whose page did not make it guess.

How should a page be structured so an engine can quote it?

One question per heading, one idea per paragraph, and the answer in the first two sentences under the heading. An engine lifts a passage, not a page, so the passage has to survive being read on its own.

• Fix 1 — headings are questions, not labels. "Pricing" is a filing category. "How much does a custom CRM cost?" is something a person typed into a box.
• Fix 2 — answer directly underneath, then earn the depth. If the first two sentences are throat-clearing, the quotable part is four paragraphs down where nothing will reach it.

A quick check on pages you have already written: under each heading, delete every paragraph but one and see whether the heading is still answered. If it is not, that section is not a passage. It is a paragraph that needed the four before it.

Which schema markup matters most for AI search?

Three, in this order: Organization, FAQPage, Service. Organization ties your name to a thing instead of a string, FAQPage hands over question and answer pairs already in the shape an engine wants, and Service says what you sell and where.

• Fix 3 — Organization on the homepage: name, URL, logo, email, the area you serve, the people behind it. One block on one page, and it does more work than the rest of your markup together.
• Fix 4 — FAQPage wherever a page already answers questions. Real ones, taken out of your inbox, not questions invented to hold keywords.

This site is the worked example. Its homepage ships two blocks of JSON-LD. The Organization block carries the company name, the logo, hello@99six.dev, the Netherlands and then worldwide as the area served, and both founders with their roles. Its FAQPage block carries the two questions people open with — what the name means, and what happens after the first call. Nothing in either one is marketing copy. It is the same facts the page shows a reader, written a second time for a reader that does not read.

Schema is a claim about the page. It earns nothing the page does not already say, so mark up what the page says, in the words the page says it. An FAQ that exists only in the markup is the kind of thing that can get rich results switched off, and it wins nothing with an engine that reads the page anyway.

What kind of facts do answer engines actually use?

Checkable ones. Names, places, dates, prices, durations, counts — anything that either agrees with the rest of the web or does not.

• Fix 5 — trade adjectives for facts. "Fast turnaround" is unusable by anything. "Most builds ship in two to eight weeks, with a demo every week" is a sentence an engine can repeat and a reader can hold you to.
• Fix 6 — say the boring things out loud. Where you are, who does the work, what you charge for and what you turn down.

That last one is the line most sites leave out, and it is the one that keeps you out of answers you were going to lose anyway. An engine that knows what you do not do can place you in the answers where you do.

Why does a two-year-old page get skipped even when it is still true?

Because nothing on the page says which it is. An engine cannot tell "still true" from "abandoned", so it reaches for the source that was updated after the last thing that changed in your field.

• Fix 7 — date your pages, and keep the date honest. A stamp that moves every night because a build touched the file is worse than no stamp: it is a claim about the content that the content does not support.

This is not a rewrite treadmill. Twice a year, open your five most important pages and change what has gone wrong — the price that moved, the tool you stopped using, the step that is not a step any more. Then let the date say so. A page with an old date and no edits is telling the truth about itself, which is its own kind of signal.

How to get cited by ChatGPT when nothing else mentions you

Mostly, you do not. Engines lean on sources they already trust, so the shortest route into an answer is to become a fact on a page somebody else maintains.

• Fix 8 — get into the places that already describe companies like yours: the trade directories, the business register entry, the partner and integration pages of the tools you build on, the client site that credits who built it. These are descriptions an engine reads, not links bought by the dozen.
• Fix 9 — say the same thing in every one of them. Same company name, same one-line description, same email, same city. Consistency is what lets an engine merge the mentions into one entity instead of three.

Three spellings of your own name are three half-entities, and none of them is you.

How do you check what ChatGPT and AI Overviews say about you now?

Ask them, in the words a customer would use, and write the answers down. It is one sitting of work, and without that baseline none of the nine fixes above has a result you can see.

• Ask five questions you want to win — who builds custom CRMs in the Netherlands, what a custom CRM costs, whether one is worth it. Not your company name: that is the one query you already win.
• Record three things per answer: whether you appear at all, which sources were cited instead, and what the answer got wrong about you.
• Read the pages it did cite. They are your brief. Whatever they answer that you do not is your next page.
• Run it again monthly, not daily. Answers move on their own, and one run tells you nothing about a direction.

What an engine gets wrong about you is usually a page edit rather than a campaign. Engines repeat what pages say, so if the answer is wrong, some page out there says it — often your own, in a sentence written three years ago and never read since.

Fixes one to six you can start this afternoon. Seven to nine pay back over months. Do them in that order, run the check again, and the result shows up as your own sentences coming back at you inside somebody else’s answer. If you would rather hand it over, this is the SEO and AEO half of what we do, and it starts with a thirty-minute call.

If that is your week too, thirty minutes is enough to find out.

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